L'assurance-maladie au Canada: les raisons de l'implication de l‘État

Sommaire: Cet article souligne d'abord brièvenient l'importance politique de l'assurance-maladie au Canada, de même que son importance en tant qu'objet de recherche. Á la suite d'un tour d'horizon des principaux champs d'intérêt de la recherche sur les politiques, l'auteur propose de s'attarder plus longriement à la question de savoir pourquoi le Canada s'est doté de programmes d'assurancemaladie. Cette question est abordée par le biais d'une étude comparative d'Anthony King, publiée en 1973, qui attribuait l'absence de programmes universels d'assurance-maladie aux États-Unis à l'influence prépondérante des Idées, c'est-à-dire des valeurs collectives de la nation américaine. Pouvons-nous également expliquer la présence de tels programmes au Canada par cette variable? L'examen du contexte dans lequel chacun des onze gouverneinents impliqués a pris la decision d'implanter un programme d'assurance-maladie perinet d'affirmer que le rôle des Idées a été déterminant pour seulement trois de ceux-ci: le gouvernement fédéral, celui de la Saskatchewan et celui du Québec. La décision du gouvernement fédéral a été fortement influencée par les initiatives britanniques en la matière; la Saskatchewan est intervenue en mison de l'idéologie socialiste de son gouvernement; quant au Québec, il a agi sous l'impulsion dun interventionnisme en rupture avec le passé. Cependant, puisque les huit autres gouvernements en sont venus à croire nécessaire d'offrir de tels programmes à cause des initiatives du gouvernement fédéral et de celui de la Saskatchewan, on peut néanmoins considérer pe la variable des Idées constitue fondanientalement la variable clé qui explique la création de programmes d'assurance-maladie au Canada. Parmi les trois phénomènes d'Idées distingués, c'est l'influence de la Crande-Bretagne qui s'est probahlement avérée la plus importante. Abstract: First of all, this article underlines briefly the political significance of health insurance in Canada. After reviewing the main areas of interest for policy research, the author considers at greater length the reasons why Canada opted in favour of a health insurance plan. This question is introduced through a comparative study by Anthony King, published in 1973. which attributes the absence of a universal health insurance plan in the United States to the preponderont influence of Ideas, which is to say, the collective values of the American nation. Likewise, can we explain the existence of such programs in Canada on the basis of this variable? A study of the context in which each of the eleven governments involved made the decision to set up a health insurance plan shows that Ideas have played a decisive role for only three of them: the federal government, the government of Saskatchewan and the government of Quebec. The federal government's decision had been strongly influenced by the British example; Saskatchewan acted because of the socialist ideology of its government; as to Quebec, it moved under the impulse of an interventionist movement breaking with its tradition. However, since the eight other governments came to believe that they had to offer such programs because of the initiatives of both the federal government and the government of Saskatchewan, one can consider nevertheless that the ideas variable was basically the key to the creation of health insurance programs in Canada. A further examination of the three Ideas phenomena indicates that it is probably Great Britain's influence which has been most important.     

Watchdogs in Our Midst: How Presidents Monitor Coalitions in Brazil's Multiparty Presidential Regime

When delegating governing tasks to a coalition partner, the president would like to give a minister ample administrative powers to be able to effectively accomplish the political mission. Due to information asymmetries, the president runs the risk that this discretion might be used to pursue policy outcomes that may harm the president's preferences. This trade‐off between delegation and control is key to understanding governance strategies the president chooses to minimize agency risks and coordinate public policies. With Brazil as a case study, this article demonstrates that presidents have strategically made frequent use of junior ministers as watchdogs of coalition partners, especially when coalition allies are ideologically distant from the president's preferences. Yet neither the portfolio salience nor the president's decision to share powers with coalition partners proportionally seems to interfere in such strategic decisions.     

Negotiating a Korea – EU free trade agreement: easier said than done

A number of countries have chosen recently to shift away from an exclusive support to trade multilateralism and towards regional or bilateral trade agreements. Being no exceptions in this respect, the Republic of South Korea and the European Union have engaged in a bilateral FTA negotiation in early 2007. The objective of the paper is to account for the unexpected difficulties encountered in the negotiation. The paper starts with a brief overview of the trade and investment relations between the two partners and underlines the complementarity between the two partners, as well as their respective offensive and defensive interests. As a next step, the paper delves into the “politics” of the FTA negotiation with a view to highlighting the motivations and objectives of the various partners involved. It comes to the conclusion that the major reason why the negotiation turned out to be more complex than initially expected relates to the two partners’ diverging views as to what a discriminatory FTA should imply.     

Inching Toward Accountability: The Evolution of Brazil's Anticorruption Institutions, 1985–2010

This article analyzes the evolution of the network of Brazilian federal accountability institutions over the course of the past generation, between the transition to democracy and the end of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's second term. Substantively, the article charts the significant gains that have been made in accountability institutions. Theoretically, it evaluates the evolution of these institutions as a consequence of the distribution of rules, routines, roles, and resources across a larger institutional network, demonstrating that changes in the various bureaucratic agencies have mutually reinforced each other and generated autocatalytic processes of reform.     

Legislative production and public spending in France

Public Choice - The aim of this article is to help explain the history of the public spending-to-GDP ratio in France by examining the production of laws and regulations. It empirically finds a...     

Use of forensic investigations in anti-doping

The fight against doping is mainly focused on direct detection, using analytical methods for the detection of doping agents in biological samples. However, the World Anti-Doping Code also defines doping as possession, administration or attempted administration of prohibited substances or methods, trafficking or attempted trafficking in any prohibited substance or methods. As these issues correspond to criminal investigation, a forensic approach can help assessing potential violation of these rules. In the context of a rowing competition, genetic analyses were conducted on biological samples collected in infusion apparatus, bags and tubing in order to obtain DNA profiles. As no database of athletes' DNA profiles was available, the use of information from the location detection as well as contextual information were key to determine a population of suspected athletes and to obtain reference DNA profiles for comparison. Analysis of samples from infusion systems provided 8 different DNA profiles. The comparison between these profiles and 8 reference profiles from suspected athletes could not be distinguished. This case-study is one of the first where a forensic approach was applied for anti-doping purposes. Based on this investigation, the International Rowing Federation authorities decided to ban not only the incriminated athletes, but also the coaches and officials for 2 years.     

Craniofacial reconstruction as a prediction problem using a Latent Root Regression model

In this paper, we present a computer-assisted method for facial reconstruction. This method provides an estimation of the facial shape associated with unidentified skeletal remains. Current computer-assisted methods using a statistical framework rely on a common set of extracted points located on the bone and soft-tissue surfaces. Most of the facial reconstruction methods then consist of predicting the position of the soft-tissue surface points, when the positions of the bone surface points are known. We propose to use Latent Root Regression for prediction. The results obtained are then compared to those given by Principal Components Analysis linear models. In conjunction, we have evaluated the influence of the number of skull landmarks used. Anatomical skull landmarks are completed iteratively by points located upon geodesics which link these anatomical landmarks, thus enabling us to artificially increase the number of skull points. Facial points are obtained using a mesh-matching algorithm between a common reference mesh and individual soft-tissue surface meshes. The proposed method is validated in term of accuracy, based on a leave-one-out cross-validation test applied to a homogeneous database. Accuracy measures are obtained by computing the distance between the original face surface and its reconstruction. Finally, these results are discussed referring to current computer-assisted reconstruction facial techniques.